Vienna 2024: The First Four Weeks (on our own)

Our yearly Vienna trip divides neatly into two parts: the first, longer part where I'm there on my own with the kids, and then the final two weeks when Mr. joins us. Now we're at the end of the first part, here's a photo dump of lots of things we've been up to. It's been hot - every day, pretty much, has been over 30 degrees and so there's a big theme of water!

Before we went, N(9) created this little book of anticipation...

They also practiced the flights in advance - although what they didn't anticipate was that we'd miss our connection in Amsterdam, so we arrived around midnight! A few pictures of the lovely outside yard in the place where we're staying; we didn't take any indoor pics, but the place is very nice and much larger than any we've ever stayed in: 90 m2, with two bedrooms rather than a pull-out sofa in the lounge!

We were greeted by a very... interesting neighbour. Arriving at midnight on Saturday night we knew to be quiet, and I told the kids we'd walk in and go straight to bed. And so we did - walked into the flat in silence, just put our bags down and cleaned our teeth. 20 minutes later, the kids were in bed already and I was cleaning my teeth, police rang our doorbell! Apparently the downstairs neighbour complained of 'stomping' in our flat. That would be us, walking from room to room getting ready... my goodness. We're walking on tippy toes in that flat now.

The next morning, that neighbour showed up herself to tell me how awful and illegal it was that this flat is being rented out as an Airbnb. I let her rant, and the kids came to see her too, and I think she went away somewhat placated. Still, we'll have to be very careful here.

Home practice for the flights!

At Amsterdam airport

A nice big yard

The kids spent their first week at dance camp, without me so there's no photos of that; I spent my childfree week mostly in bed with a cold. Oh well. Here's two photos of when they got their 'sweets plates' at the end of the dance camp show.

After that week, it was funtime! Lots of swimming, both in the danube and in various pools...

With my sister, A

Loving my sister's dog, Banksy

We're definitely catching some sun!

We also had some very interesting outings, from giving out food at a foodbank (my sister works for a charity and managed to organise this for us) to learning about all sorts of things...

Shadow theatre

Scuba diving

Insect catching

Examining the insects

My sister A organised for some friends of hers to take the kids out while I worked, and we also did a bit of sightseeing together...

All this and many other activities - playgrounds, seeing Bernhard Fibich, walking with my aunt M, lots of ice cream eating - made up our month of summer fun so far. Now we can't wait to see Mr. again!

Comments

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs. They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...

Will Dig Life

Search This Blog